Sushi has a lot of vinegar mixed into it
by Alatariele C
Summary: ...It's a lot like life, Katsura thinks. ONE-SHOT - On Katsura's past and perhaps a little about why he is the way he is. Includes other major characters from the story and all. (No pairings)


DISCLAIMER: I do not own Gintama, but my love for the character of Katsura is genuine. (It's supposed to be funny, but there's plenty of angst-material in this anime, everyone.)

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><p>.<p>

SUSHI HAS A LOT OF VINEGAR MIXED INTO IT

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Katsura's earliest memory is in a kitchen. The sun curtained surroundings are a little hazy at the edges of his memory, but still clear enough to make out wooden walls and bunches of herbs and russet onions dangling from rafters. There is a smell of earth and home and outdoors indoors, and the sharp sweetness of ashy pine.

He remembers clutching the faded fabric of his mother's skirts as he rests on trembling toes to watch he hands on the kitchen, so sure of themselves, those hands. They were constantly moving, holding spoons and opening jars and wielding knives and sometimes coming down to pat his head and leave a fine white dust on his raven locks. And Katsura doesn't remember ever saying a word. He only watches from the safety of his mother's side as her hands delve into a bowl and emerge clutching a ball of moist rice and pats them into soft-edged triangles.

Then his mother moves the bowl closer to the edge so he can do the same. And he does. He concentrates hard as he mimics the gentle dexterity of those hands and contributes his own rice triangles to the growing line on the table.

He is Katsura Kotaro, a Joui patriot, a well-known and well-feared name. He is an assassin and a leader and swords fit into his hands like scabbards. He makes raucous gatherings silent just by walking into a room and he still sleeps with his eyes open the way he has grown up doing ever since he made the decision to use a sword for a living.

And his first and most cherished memory is making onigiri.

(But they're nice onigiri, Elizabeth. My mother's own recipe and her onigiri was the pride of the village's - yes we'll have some after this month's Joui meeting)

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That is his earliest memory and the one he holds onto the most. It is a memory that he'd rather lose his sword arm first before forgetting. He no longer remembers very much about his childhood anymore or where his home used to be. Those memories have slowly eroded, pushed out of his mind and out of his reach and replaced instead with the song of the katana and knowing how to cut down one's enemy.

He can remember the days at the town dojo, a small, scrawny country boy in a patched but painstakingly scrubbed hakama, sitting in a classroom that was larger than his own house, and meeting a dark-haired boy with angry eyes. He remembers being too far from home to go back in the summer and sending letters he knows no one in his family can read every month. He remembers sweat and blood dripping from unpractised hands and the first time he came close to losing a fight.

No one ever let him forget his poor beginnings - so he let it define him. When the boys and teachers who couldn't forgive loss at the hands of someone who thought five ryo was a lot of money, told him to go back to the kitchens, he did. Those kitchens were the largest he'd ever seen. So he made onigiri and all the meals from home, and more onigiri. He'd prepare them and imagine his mother helping his hands make the triangles and place the seaweed _just so. _

Most times there would be an ache at his chest long after he swallowed.

(His village was burned in the days of the Joui wars and by then he was travelling with Shouyo-sensei on the other side of the country. He never got to go back.)

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There was Takasugi, and there is Takasugi. One is someone he might have known, a person on the other end of his blade, a beast grinning from behind a haze of incensed smoke. The other was a boy who ate his onigiri slathered with irony, a rich boy with nothing else to eat.

It's funny how the lessons learned from his mother's side cement bonds that not even the sharpest blade can sever. It's funny how the first time he saw Takasugi after Shoyou-sensei's death he was asked through papery lips if he still knew how to make onigiri. It's funny how his dishes can mean so many different things when it's in another person's bento box or on a plate atop a lonely grave.

To him onigiri tastes like warm kitchens and battle smoke and acrid nostalgia.

(It's only rice and filling and nori. It's only rice and filling and nori, and it's the closest he'll ever get to the past he can never return to.)

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When he's drunk, Gintoki sings old songs and brings up girls they'd moon-eyed over when they were adolescent troublemakers. Katsura has never actually been drunk - he'd witnessed enough of the inverse ratio between the number of glasses and the person's dignity to want to - so he drinks tea in sake cups and promises Sensei that he'll make sure his student gets home safely.

One of these days he will fix this country (this peace that is not peace but an illusion teetering on blood, sacrifices and decapitated heads) and the friend who he lies that he won't forgive. He'll do it with the practiced swing of his arm; he will do it with whispers and unsuspicious meetings among the samurai of the common folk - his people -, he will set things in place so that others (Gintoki, the other samurais-in-their-hearts living ordinary lives in unordinary places) can finish them.

Like rice under gentle, unyielding hands, a good country will form. Katsura has not lost hope yet - he never will - and knows that when he does would be the day Gintoki cuts him down.

(Sushi rice has vinegar mixed into it. It's a lot like life, he thinks.)

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Katsura's mind is one that survives in orderliness. It is not labyrinthine but straight and organised. All neat lines and no dark corners. Clockwork precision. It is his life-prolonger and deadliest weapon in battle and his downfall in terms of the superficial, social aspects. His mind rejects the fleeting trends of society and runs the way it always has, dancing to a tune that has never changed and never will.

But he understands friendship and caring for someone so much you forget yourself, as he understands equations and tidy characters on paper.

The Yorozuya's kitchen is crowded - and warm, no curtains barring the descent of sun beams - and Katsura finds a sukonbu packet in every drawer. Gintoki is sprawled on the floor and chanting "Zura" in a drunken daze while Shinpachi tries to convince Kagura that uncooked rice can't be eaten.

He sits among the bedlam, laughing quietly to himself when Elizabeth asks (writes) how on earth the Yorozuya survives in this chaos. He knows chaos, though his silent demeanour may suggest otherwise. It's not chaos in the more accurate sense of a battlefield and the hanging atmosphere of death... no wait, actually it is.

He makes them onigiri, just because. He uses an entire pot of rice for the Yato girl and her unnatural appetite, and leaves the plates on the table before walking out the door, smiling.

Come Elizabeth, he says to the yellow beaked whatever-you-call-it holding the umbrella at his side. Let's go home.

There is an onigiri in his pocket and he thinks of warm kitchens as they walk through dimming streets.

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-FIN-

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><p>AUTHORS NOTE:<p>

So what did you think? (Wow, I should have just titled this onigiri...) Just my take on Katsura's past. A bigi thanks to NoeticSky for looking over this fic and fixing all it's mistakes before they burn the readers eyes.

Please read and review!

Alatariele C.  
>-in collab. with NoeticSky<p> 


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